The Follower Read Free

kind of anguished tenderness:
    ‘My God, what’s the little fool got into now?’
    Then, instinctively, he groped for explanations that would put Ellie in the clear. Maybe she had gone away. Maybe she had lent the apartment to Corey. Maybe … He pushed all that aside. He mustn’t start trying to kid himself. Because Ellie was Ellie, because she had an affinity for disaster, she was almost certainly in this up to the neck. This was her jam all right.
    And because it was hers, it was his too. He must keep calm. He mustn’t feel. Not yet — not until he had this thing under control. He must work it out coldly like a problem in engineering, reconstruct what had happened, gauge the danger and neutralize it. Later he would start feeling about Ellie.
    ‘Keep calm.’
    He said it to himself in words in his mind. It was a habit he had developed in the early rough and tumble of his boxing days when a crisis had materialized in the ring. The actual shape of the words had seemed to have some magic power for him, and now he found that the charm still had its effect. He felt a little giddy. That was all and that would pass.
    ‘Keep calm.’
    He squatted down again by the body, the skirts of his bathrobe sliding back from his bare knees. He touched a cold cheek. He knew practically nothing about rigor mortis, but he could see that the jaw had begun to stiffen and elongate. Corey hadn’t been dead long. A couple of hours, maybe. He searched for a gun. He couldn’t find one. It was crazy, then, to hope for suicide. He might as well accept the fact too.
    He crossed to the bar and poured a shot of Scotch into a tumbler. There were two soiled glasses standing side by side next to a whisky bottle. Two — Corey and Ellie? That was bad too. His reflection was thrown back to him from a mirror behind the bar. With the old grey bathrobe wrapped around him and his light hair spiky from the shower, he looked absurdly informal for a man facing the greatest ordeal of his life. He sat down on one of the stools, sipping the liquor, thinking.
    Two dirty glasses. No gun. No Ellie. She had killed him, then? And fled in a panic with the gun? Because that’s what Ellie would have done. If something bad had happened, she wouldn’t have hung around, she would have run away from it.
    It was amazing, in a way, how clearly he understood her shortcomings and accepted them without criticism. Yes, Ellie would have run away. But there was something else about her that was far more important, something he was as certain of as he could be certain of anything. However wild she was, Ellie could never be cold or calculating. If she’d killed Corey, there’d been an accident, maybe, or some situation which had to have this ending. She could kill like a kid, but not like a murderess. But what had happened here to end in murder didn’t matter yet.
    It was what he was going to do to straighten it out that mattered.
    Against all probability, he felt a kind of excitement. His masculinity, his function as his wife’s protector, was being put to the test.
    He accepted the challenge.
    He finished the Scotch. It had made him icily calm. Already he had decided what he would have to do. Mark had none of the instincts of an outlaw. Unless there were completely unforeseen elements, he would sooner or later go to the police. That was only common sense. He and Ellie could not spend the rest of their lives as fugitives. But he would have to find Ellie first, learn what had happened, coach her into a reasonable story. To call the police now and have to admit that she had run away would be fatal for her. She’d never stand a chance in court — particularly since Corey had been an ex-fiancé. No, it was imperative to find her before the police found Corey. And to find her would take time. By now she might be almost anywhere. Certainly she would never come back here.
    Tomorrow morning, around nine, Ellie’s old Swedish maid would arrive. If the body was still here, she would